Special issue: Digital platforms for development

Digital platforms are the hot topic in research and practice today and are now an area of multidisciplinary research in its own right, involving economics, accounting, entrepreneurship, management and beyond. It is also a core subject in Information Systems (IS), research comprising tracks in all major IS conferences and the topic of multiple special issues (e.g., Constantinides et al., 2018) with another currently ongoing in this journal focussing on “Digital Platforms and Ecosystems”. The now mainstream research on digital platforms reflects the significance of the platform economy. Cusumano et al. (2020) points out that the top-ranked companies by market capitalization are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company), and Amazon. Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent are not far behind. As of January 2020, these seven companies represented more than $6.3 trillion in market value, and all of them are platform-based businesses. Impressive though these figures may be on the commercial importance of digital platforms, the purpose of this special issue is to identify and foster a relatively unexplored research area concerning the nature, significance and impact of digital platforms for development. It is a response to the call from the ICT for development (ICT4D) community (e.g., Koskinen et al., 2018; Nielsen, 2017) to stimulate the development of a research agenda by inviting a variety of perspectives on digital platforms, including social, technical, economic, organisational, personal and environmental. Moreover, while existing research on digital platforms primarily focuses on the private sector, new business models and architectures in the context of the global North, we challenged the IS community to also explore non-profit platforms, platforms in the public sector and platforms in low resource and developing country settings. To proceed, contextualise and showcase the three articles in this issue, we must first get our hands around two key questions: what are digital platforms? and what is development? We leave it to the reader to explore the detailed review and definitions in this special issue, but our starting point for the first question is the definition from OECD (2019) (of ‘online’ platforms, a term used interchangeably with ‘digital’) as ‘... digital service that facilitates interactions between two or more distinct but interdependent sets of users (whether firms or individuals) who interact through the service via the Internet’ (p. 23). This broad definition includes platforms of different types across different domains of application such as for example search engines, app stores, social media, gig work, marketplaces, dating, music, video sharing and so on. By necessity, a high-level perspective must suffice and in this issue Bonina et al. (2021) offer a classification into transactional, innovation and hybrid platforms. This differentiates between transactional mediated marketplaces (e.g., Uber) and platforms offering a broad audience tools to innovate (e.g., the Android platform). There are also ‘hybrid’ platforms that display characteristics of both transaction and innovation. An example of a hybrid platform from the commercial sector is the ‘Valve’ gaming platform that enables transactional sales of the products and also the social networking on the ‘Steam’ platform. The innovation platform component known as ‘Steamworks’ contains developer resources and an app store for products built by 3rd party professional developers and amateurs. In this issue, Madon and Schoemaker (2021) consider the relevance of this typology of transaction, innovation and hybrid platforms to a development context. In addition, they build on the concept of ‘platformisation’ which refers to the process by which a closed system is transformed into an open platform for commercial purposes or for collaboration. For the understanding of digital platforms and development, Sein and Harindranath (2004) point out that ICT has come to be recognised as an important contributor to industrial and economic development, classified into three main perspectives: modernization, dependency, and human development. To this list, we can add the sustainability perspective encapsulated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2021). In short, the modernization DOI: 10.1111/isj.12364